Pynchon rooming with V. Woolf?

[Mark Kohut]

What do we Plist readers and/or other scholars think might be an
influence on the scenic structure and way of telling that is GR?
By that, I mean, those scenes that flow into each other as if dreams
are the organizing principle and all those characters, so many to appear
once and not again as so many readers and reviewers are always saying
and some are always complaining about.

Not exactly Austen or Middlemarch or even Dickens or Melville (except for
The Confidence Man),
other very worthy writers.

Joyce, yes?, and even T. S. Eliot (as Virginia belatedly realized about
those shifting
images and scenes from his poems, esp The Wasteland.)

Maybe Beily's Petersburg (as Nabokov is always saying) which I only know by
hearsay
(and one Plister's reading) or Berlin Alexanderplatz, again known only by
hearsay.

I offer some possible influence of Woolf's third novel, *Jacob's Room*.
There is vague thematic
suggestion that he read her, some of her anyway. This one was her first one
in her new
fiction-changing voice. (By the way, published in that annus mirable year
1922, the home in time
of The Wasteland and Ulysses (both completed and published. Both were read
and/or partially published in the build-up years).

The book is scene after scene, often simply separated by a space. Lots,
wherein you have to
learn where you are, what is happening or being thought by whom. It moves
from some kind of (omniscient) narrator to inside consciousnesses, to
indirect discoursing, to conversations and observations and back and forth
in time, of course. That paragraph with Slothrop and his backstory in the
war as the paradigmatic way of GR that we tackled comes to mind more than a
few times while reading Jacob's Room.

Given the ones mentioned above that I haven't read, Jacob's Room (and the
later less digressive To The Lighthouse) are the novels in my reading
experience that most remind me of this aspect of
Gravity's Rainbow. (Along with reading Barthelme's stories one after
another --in a way). What ones remind you?

And, perhaps relevantly, Jacob is only seen 'as an absence' so to speak. He
has disappeared, so to speak, in the war by the time of the book; it is all
backstory and flashbacks within a present time that jumps forward a lot (as
In The Lighthouse). His name is Jacob Flanders.

A--And,--I am still reading it--there is some Woolfian indication that it
is his high scientific and philosophical education at Oxbridge, run by the
Elite who run the countries, that sets him (And England) up for the
slaughter that was Jacob's war. His education, England, set up all those
soldiers to die uselessly, stupidly, in Flanders Field, at the Somme.

And a Happy New Year to All.
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